Lindner, Gordon

ORAL HISTORY OF GORDON LINDNER
Interviewed and filmed by Keith McDaniel
December 30, 2010
Mr. McDaniel: This is Keith McDaniel and today is December the 30th, 2010 and I am at the home of Gordon Lindner. Mr. Lindner, thank you for taking time to talk to us.
Mr. Lindner: Glad to be of service. I’m anxious to hear what you’ve got here.
Mr. McDaniel: All right. Well, let’s just start at the very beginning. Why don’t you tell me where you were born and raised and something about your family?
Mr. Lindner: Okay. Well I was born May 5, 1923 in Great Falls, Montana. My folks, Herb and Nelly Lindner had moved out there about two years before that when he was able to get a job with the Anaconda – ACM copper mining company. I grew up in Great Falls, went through elementary, secondary schools. Graduated from high school, was involved with tennis, baseball, drama. Enjoyed high school particularly.
Mr. McDaniel: So your dad worked for the mining company?
Mr. Lindner: Yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: Copper mining company?
Mr. Lindner: Yeah. He was in the zinc processing end of it.
Mr. McDaniel: What kind of education did your dad have?
Mr. Lindner: He had a mining degree from the University of Wisconsin.
Mr. McDaniel: What did your mother do? Did she work out of the home?
Mr. Lindner: She was typical home – yeah, home woman like women were in those days.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. So did you have any brothers or sisters?
Mr. Lindner: I had one brother, younger, thirteen months. Essentially one year younger, so he was one year behind me all the way through school.
Mr. McDaniel: What was it like growing up in Montana at that time?
Mr. Lindner: Well we evidently enjoyed it particularly in wintertime, which is different from down here, because we ice skated, we skied; we did all the sports that you would normally do in the wintertime up there.
Mr. McDaniel: Were you any good at any of them?
Mr. Lindner: Well I enjoyed them all.
[laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: But you didn’t go to college on a skiing scholarship or anything like that did you?
Mr. Lindner: No, but I did go on a scholarship.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay, so you graduated. You grew up in Montana there and you went to school there.
Mr. Lindner: Right.
Mr. McDaniel: So you stayed there from the time you were born until college, right?
Mr. Lindner: 1941. I graduated from high school in June of ’41 and I had already applied to Montana State College which – at Bozeman, Montana – which is now Montana State University. I got a one year scholarship for tuition and went into the Mechanical Engineering Program.
Mr. McDaniel: How far was that from your home?
Mr. Lindner: That was roughly two hundred miles.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay. So you went to – this was 1941 – the fall of ’41, you entered Montana State College to study engineering.
Mr. Lindner: Right.
Mr. McDaniel: Then the U.S. went into World War II. What do you remember about that?
Mr. Lindner: Well, I was at a boarding house that first year as a freshman and we were sitting around listening to the radio, I remember, that Sunday morning when December 7th occurred. Yeah, it was quite an unbelievable event then as it still is now. I continued in school until March 1943. At that time, recruiters for the U.S. Army Air Corps, which is now the Air Force, came through the University looking for interested students to go into their program and become, oh, weather forecasters. They just weaved a tremendous, interesting program.
Mr. McDaniel: They were good salesmen, weren’t they?
Mr. Lindner: “You wouldn’t be up in the front lines. You’d be behind predicting weather conditions for the airplanes that they’re flying out in that area. After the war, airlines are going to take off. They’re going to be needing your kind of people everywhere in the United States. It’s going to be a wonderful future for you.” I think they cleaned out the whole sophomore class waiting to sign up.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. So basically you were in school for two years?
Mr. Lindner: Yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: So I guess by this point you were what, nineteen or so, nineteen or twenty?
Mr. Lindner: Yeah. Well 1940 – yeah, about twenty I guess.
Mr. McDaniel: So after two years of college, you joined the Army Air Corps?
Mr. Lindner: Yeah, Army Air Corps. I was inducted March 6th of 1943, went to Salt Lake City, where I was actually inducted and sent from there down to Fresno, California, where I went through basic training and waiting to be assigned a college for meteorology, and I waited, and I went through basic training, and I waited, and I went through basic training. Well, about August, I was still there when I was told that there were more candidates for meteorology school than they would ever need and, “We’re going to have to do something else with you.” So they sent me to Stanford, Palo Alto, California where I took a few more tests. First thing I knew, I was in the ASTP, Army Specialized Training Program. And what was that? Well, they’re going to send me back to school that I just got out of. And where did they send me? Would you think they’d send me anywhere near Montana? Well, no: City College of New York.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? Excuse me for just a second. Take that cord that’s hanging by your hands and just put it over to one side of your knee there.
Mr. Lindner: This?
Mr. McDaniel: There we go. Yeah, that’s good. When you were moving your hands, which is fine, I hear a little rubbing there.
Mr. Lindner: Oh, all right.
Mr. McDaniel: It’s fine but now you’re – we’re – whatever you want to do is fine.
Mr. Lindner: Okay.
Mr. McDaniel: So you ended up in City College in New York?
Mr. Lindner: Yeah. That was August of ’43. I stayed at that college for essentially a full year because August of 1944, the program is – well the program is already failing anyway.
Mr. McDaniel: What did they send you there to study?
Mr. Lindner: Oh, the same things that I would be studying if I was back at Montana State College. They had my records, so they knew what courses I still needed. So I had essentially one full year of college which I was able to use when I got back to Montana after the war, which was a break. It was a break being in New York. By gosh, they took care of you there, the U.S.O. We saw more first class movies, live shows. It was wonderful.
Mr. McDaniel: Probably – like you said your interest in drama and theater in high school, I thought that was very – and you probably never had an opportunity to be exposed to that kind of thing before, not on that level.
Mr. Lindner: Not on that level, no. All this was free. Get a ticket at the U.S.O.
Mr. McDaniel: Wow. So you stayed there until ’44.
Mr. Lindner: ’44.
Mr. McDaniel: Then what happened?
Mr. Lindner: Well just before the program was cancelled there at CCNY, we were interviewed again. They wanted to know what our interests were in professional – what we wanted to be when we finally got out of the Army and so forth. Well one of the things I was very interested in and – modesty – did a very good job at was drafting. That’s what I had a course there in CCNY, so I mentioned that. To this day, I think that is the reason that I was picked to come to Oak Ridge and the Manhattan Project and [become] a member of the Special Engineer Detachment, because when I got here, I went to work at Y-12 Engineering. Everybody in those days did their own drafting work. So I was assigned a drafting table right away, T-squares and all that good stuff.
Mr. McDaniel: So you were doing drafting at Y-12 for various departments or –
Mr. Lindner: Well, essentially for the electromagnetic separation process.
Mr. McDaniel: When did you come to Oak Ridge?
Mr. Lindner: That was early August of ’44, probably August 6th, I would guess. It was the first week.
Mr. McDaniel: I talked to several SED members. A lot of folks told me that other people didn’t even know they were in the Army because they were just working in civilian clothes and going to work just like everybody else.
Mr. Lindner: Not this kid. We didn’t have any civilian clothes. We went in uniform every day. I’m surprised there were SEDers that didn’t.
Mr. McDaniel: I know. I’ve had several that say no, they did not.
Mr. Lindner: Well, I’ll be dog gone. No.
Mr. McDaniel: So you went in uniform every day?
Mr. Lindner: Yep. Sure did. Caught a bus right by the barracks there in town.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. Now where did you live?
Mr. Lindner: In the barracks.
Mr. McDaniel: The barracks were like in the middle town section?
Mr. Lindner: Yeah. About where the pizza place – which one is that? Well Long John Silver, in that area.
Mr. McDaniel: Did all the SED live in those barracks?
Mr. Lindner: Well not all of them. The ones that didn’t were those who were married and their wives were with them because there was no housing for married GIs except the officers. So what those fellows did, those couples, they would go up to Cove Lake or Kingston and commute every day, coming in to work and going back in the evening. I was married at the time. We were married at the time because my wife was taking a nursing training course there at Montana State College. She had signed a contract that would keep her there until she graduated with a per diem every month to keep her there. So she was locked in. We got married just before I came down here in 1944.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, so you got married right before you came to Oak Ridge?
Mr. Lindner: Well at that time it looked like all of us there at CCNY and that ASTP program were going to be going into a rifle company somewhere and overseas and we’d been engaged for a year and a half by that time. We were pretty well resolved that was going to be it. So anyway, I was in the barracks.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. You were in the barracks. So tell me what – when you first found out you were coming to Oak Ridge, what did they tell you? What did they tell you about where you were going and what you were going to do?
Mr. Lindner: As I remember the only thing I was told was I was going to Knoxville, Tennessee and that’s where the train took us and we were picked up by an Army car brought out through Solway entrance into the barracks area.
Mr. McDaniel: What did you think when you came into the town?
Mr. Lindner: Well it’s hard to express what you think. You didn’t know where you were really because Oak Ridge didn’t have a name then. Sort of knew where Tennessee was but by gosh, we’re from way out West.
[laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: So you went to – I guess they took you to the barracks and got you set up, established.
Mr. Lindner: Yeah, got into Barracks E, as in ‘every.’
Mr. McDaniel: So did you start to work immediately, like the next day?
Mr. Lindner: Oh yeah. I was taken out, and I guess others too, to get our badge, our picture taken and badge made so that we could easily get in and out of the place.
Mr. McDaniel: When you went to Y-12, were you assigned to a particular building? What building were you in?
Mr. Lindner: Yep. 9739, which is just recently, I understand, been demolished, a wood building. That was the engineering building. I worked for a wonderful, little, old man, Ernie Zurker. You may have heard this name over the years. A Swedish – a Swiss background and a nice accent. But he sort of took me under his wings as my mentor. When there was a problem, a minor problem of a mechanical type needing some design changes, he would always take me along and we’d find out what the problem was and come back and he’d discuss it with me and I’d start drawing up what he had thought was the solution to the problem.
Mr. McDaniel: I’ll bet that was good for you to have somebody to mentor you just right off the bat there like that.
Mr. Lindner: Oh, it was, yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: What did you think or what did you know about what was happening at Y-12 or even in Oak Ridge?
Mr. Lindner: Well, I didn’t know too much about what was going on but I also had some Army buddies in the SED who had been sent to Berkeley, California where E. O. Lawrence was perfecting the procedure for that separation process, and they didn’t come right out and tell me what was going on but they had a textbook which showed what the cyclotron was doing and gave me as close as they felt they could without being hung [laughter]. So I had I guess maybe a basic idea what was going on.
Mr. McDaniel: But once you got to Oak Ridge, the calutrons are operational; they were going, weren’t they?
Mr. Lindner: Yeah, they were. They were having some problems and that’s one of the things I got involved with.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay, so you were in Oak Ridge. You’re married at the time but you were – your wife wasn’t here.
Mr. Lindner: Right.
Mr. McDaniel: So tell me, how long were you in Oak Ridge and when did you go back to school and all that?
Mr. Lindner: Okay. Well, my wife finished her work up there in Montana but she needed to take a follow-up course and she knew where I was by that time. She talked with the people up there in Montana that were regulating the follow-up procedures, and it just so happens that one of the fellows up there happened to have a relative at Norris, Tennessee. Well anyway, she found out that she could get transferred down here very easily and into a follow-up intern project. So she arrived here in the fall of ’45 right after the bomb was dropped. We stayed here until May 7th of ’46. By that time though, right after the war, housing was getting available because so many of the workers were laid off. The thing was over with. So we were very lucky.
Mr. McDaniel: You had your choice didn’t you?
Mr. Lindner: The GIs were given victory cottages. Do you know what a victory cottage is?
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, yeah.
Mr. Lindner: I got some pictures here. But we were in with another SED couple.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s tough going from the frying pan into the fire, wasn’t it?
[laughter]
Mr. Lindner: Hot as could be in those months that we were there in the summer. But anyway, we enjoyed that living. She worked at the hospital while I still worked at Y-12.
Mr. McDaniel: Were you still in the service?
Mr. Lindner: Oh, yeah. That was in May – the early part of May when I was discharged down at Ft. McPherson at Atlanta.
Mr. McDaniel: That was May of ’46?
Mr. Lindner: Yeah. During the months I was there when she came and we were at the victory cottage, I had purchased a 1941 Chevy sedan because when this was over with, we were going to go all the way back to Montana.
Mr. McDaniel: You were going to get the heck out of Dodge, weren’t you?
[laughter]
Mr. Lindner: Yeah. So anyway, I rebuilt the motor with the help of another SEDer, John Farkerson, who died some time ago, but he was a great help. After discharged down there at Ft. McPherson, we drove down along the Gulf. We just took our time. We were going to see everything we could because we were never going to be back in this part of the country. So anyway, we got up to Montana and about the middle of June thought we’d go through Yellowstone Park but it hadn’t opened up yet. It was still snowed under.
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah. So you took, what, three – two or three or four weeks to get back, didn’t you?
Mr. Lindner: Oh yeah. Just an easy, comfortable, take our time, had no worries about such things as tires that we should have been worried to death about.
Mr. McDaniel: Too young and too stupid to really know, weren’t you?
[laughter]
Mr. Lindner: Absolutely.
Mr. McDaniel: I’ve been there. Sure.
Mr. Lindner: So then went back to school at Montana State and at that time Mary Jane was pregnant with our first child, our son. He was born while I was at school down there for the summer course. But he came six weeks too early.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, my.
Mr. Lindner: We had this all planned out. I was going to get through down there.
Mr. McDaniel: Of course.
Mr. Lindner: So anyway, I came back up and then we moved down to what they called the Cottages that were set up down there in the campus areas at Montana State College and we lived down there at 806 Campus Court. I graduated in June of ’47, mainly because I had gotten a telegram from Tennessee Eastman who was charge of Y-12 wondering if I was interested in a job down there. Well in ’47 jobs were as scarce as hen’s teeth, as they say. But I took the telegram which I’ve got with me right now and showed it to the Dean of Engineering. I had all the credits I’d need, but I had one course in thermodynamics that I would not be able to take until later on in the summer or the next fall. He took a look at that and he said, “$316.00 a month?” He says, “I’ve got tenured professors here that aren’t making that kind of money. We’re going to graduate you. Anytime we get a job for somebody they’re gone. They’re graduated.” So I moved down here in June 10th of 1947, back in the same job I had in 9739 Building with the same people and stayed, and Mary Jane came down then about a month later.
Mr. McDaniel: Was Mr. Zurker still there?
Mr. Lindner: He was still there and Joe Culver, Leo Hemphill. I stayed there until the fall of 1949. I was redoing drawings that had needed to be updated for some reason. I never was too sure what that was all about but anyway it was a good job.
Mr. McDaniel: So you came back to work at Y-12 even though most everybody was gone from Y-12 at that point, I mean, a lot of people.
Mr. Lindner: Oh yeah. I was dumbfounded. When I got back here, I found out that Tennessee Eastman no longer had it, that they had been relieved by Union Carbide the first of the month of June. So I thought, “Oh boy, this may not last very long.” [laughter] I was very fortunate it lasted as long as it did. I stayed over at K-25 then until I retired in June of ’85.
Mr. McDaniel: So in ’49 you went to K-25?
Mr. Lindner: Yeah. I had a wonderful program over there. I worked for a young man who was my mentor. He wasn’t anywhere near as old as Ernie but a wonderful young man. He was a genius at engineering and I got involved with problems that were there in the Cascade that needed correction that a mechanical engineer could take care of.
Mr. McDaniel: So you did that until you retired in –
Mr. Lindner: 1985. So I had a total of thirty-eight years between Y-12 and K-25.
Mr. McDaniel: ’85 was the year that they shut pretty much everything down, didn’t they? But you were about ready to retire anyway, weren’t you?
Mr. Lindner: Yeah. I was sixty-two and the barrier plant out there is what I was really involved in and designing equipment changes. It was a very fascinating job.
Mr. McDaniel: Were you involved in the barrier process? I mean as far as design – I know that’s still classified. But were you involved in the barrier itself?
Mr. Lindner: Yeah. The machinery that automatically did all the work on it. I think there’s probably only one little piece of that whole operation that may still be classified; I don’t know. But when they shut the Cascade down out there in the early ’80s, and the barrier plant was then closed up – and that was what I enjoyed doing – I was transferred to the Gas Centrifuge Program, and I don’t want to say anything about that program. [laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: Oh you don’t? How come?
Mr. Lindner: It was absolutely the worst job ever. Nobody seemed to know what they were doing. Anyway, when they were giving out early retirements, RIFs [Reduction In Force], I was over sixty-two and I thought, “Well, it’s just about time to get out of here,” and I did.
[laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: So how long were you at the Gas Centrifuge? When did you go there?
Mr. Lindner: I was there for about a year. They gave me a job over there in something I didn’t know anything about: heat pipes. And why would – they brought me over because they said, “Well, you get along with people, Gordon,” and the guy that was in charge of that didn’t get along with anybody. So I took his job and I knew not an earthly thing about heat pipes, but I learned pretty fast. But that was a miserable job.
Mr. McDaniel: My goodness. Well, that’s an interesting story about that.
Mr. Lindner: My whole career out there, I think, was very enjoyable except for that last several months. I enjoyed going to work.
Mr. McDaniel: Did you work shift work or just regular days?
Mr. Lindner: Just regular days, but it wouldn’t be unusual if we had a particular project going and I might stay out there overnight and just be there for the next morning. I was always in a carpool, five people from Norris, and even over here when we moved to Oak Ridge.
Mr. McDaniel: Let’s go back to ’49 when you went to K-25. Where were you living then?
Mr. Lindner: At that time, we had a very nice apartment, a “K” apartment, “K2” two-bedroom on Waddell Circle and that was very nice. The only thing that bothered us was the Roane-Anderson maintenance program. They could come in any time of the day or night whether you’re home or not and do what they wanted, and be gone when – well that happened one weekend. One of the fellows that I was working with there at Y-12 had a boat out at Watts Bar and he wondered if we wanted to take my wife and I and our one-and-a-half year old son out for a ride on Saturday. My good gosh, yeah. So they came by. We did nothing to clean up the house, particularly the kitchen. Our son was in the high chair against the wall doing a good job of putting his oatmeal up against the wall. So we just dumped the dirty dishes in the sink and took off. We got back that evening. They had been in, painted the kitchen, the most bilious green you ever saw in your life right over the oatmeal, paint dropped all over the dishes in the sink. We said, “We got to do something about this.” Well, TVA had sold the town of Norris in 1948 and the outfit that bought it from up in Philadelphia was then in the act of selling individual houses there in Norris. We’d been up there and looked around. We thought, “Boy, this is a beautiful place.” So we bought a house up there and moved up there on Labor Day of 1949. We were part of the ’49ers. There were a lot of Oak Ridgers that were moving up there.
Mr. McDaniel: How long did you stay in Norris?
Mr. Lindner: Thirty years.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right, thirty years?
Mr. Lindner: Yeah. Well we were up there in September ’49. We moved back here January 4th of 1980. So it was essentially thirty years, and we’ve been here since 1980, which is another thirty years.
Mr. McDaniel: Another thirty years. That’s true. My goodness. So you said when you first came down, you had a young son. Did you have any other children?
Mr. Lindner: Yep. We had a daughter who was born at the Oak Ridge Hospital, and that’s another reason that we moved out of town was to get up to Norris. But then we had our third child, another daughter, up at Norris and she was born at the St. Mary’s in Knoxville, 1952, and there’s eighteen inches of snow on the ground and we were worried every day that she would not – she would get the call and we couldn’t make it. But those are our three children. They’re all married to their first spouses. We have six grandchildren. Five of them are married. We have twelve great-grandchildren.
Mr. McDaniel: Wow.
Mr. Lindner: Well, we’ve got six grandchildren. We’ve got a big family. All of them are doing fine.
Mr. McDaniel: Well good. So you say you carpooled from Norris to K-25 every day.
Mr. Lindner: Yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: So tell me a little bit about working at K-25. What was it like? What were the conditions like? What was the management like?
Mr. Lindner: Well I had a wonderful man that I was working for, Jack Mahoney. I don’t whether the name ever has been – but Jack always gave me jobs that he thought I could handle. Here again, we’re still doing our own drafting. So I got involved with a lot of little problems that had been big problems there in the Cascade particularly with pneumatic instrumentation that failed for one reason or another due to vibration.
Mr. McDaniel: I imagine you worked on projects on all the buildings, K-33 and [K-]31 and [K-]27 and [K-]29.
Mr. Lindner: Yeah. But then when the big Cascade Improvement Program came along in 1968 and they were upgrading all of the equipment in the barrier plant from very ancient equipment, I was put in charge of a prototype development program. Each of the machinery units was put together. They were designed by the engineering group themselves. Parts were all manufactured right there at K-25. Then I had a laboratory area that we put the units together, tested them out before they went back over to replace the old equipment in the barrier plant.
Mr. McDaniel: That was a huge project. I mean that was like a 1.5 billion or a billion dollar project, wasn’t it?
Mr. Lindner: It was a big one. Yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: I guess like any job, there were times where you had a lot of work to do and then there were times where you didn’t have as much to do?
Mr. Lindner: Well that’s true because in the early ’50s before the big program came on, we were getting a little short on things to do. I was in an Instrument Development Department at that time. So what were we doing? We were doing work for – oh my goodness, that man’s name, Dr. Anderson I think it was. Anyway, he was with a biology group and they always had little, nitty, bitty projects that required some engineering to get things going. So that’s what we were doing. I enjoyed the fool out of that.
Mr. McDaniel: I’ll bet. It was something different I guess.
Mr. Lindner: Oh, yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: So you were doing some work for the lab?
Mr. Lindner: Yeah. Well, this project was located out there at S-50, the old S-50 project buildings. So they were right handy to get to find out what they wanted. In fact, some of the equipment that I worked on when it was loaned out to or taken up to NIH in Washington – National Institutes of Health, right there at Bethesda – I went with the equipment to get it set up and get it running right. So I did a lot of traveling, which was great, too. I took my wife along on some of those.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, that’s good. So you were living in Norris for thirty years, and then you moved back here about five years before you retired. Let me ask you a question about the SED. Now didn’t the SED or doesn’t the SED kind of have a group that gets together or you did?
Mr. Lindner: We did.
Mr. McDaniel: You did. When did that start and what kind of activities did you folks do?
Mr. Lindner: Well in 1993, that was fifty years from the time that the SED was first set up. Well no, it was five years before that that we had our first reunion, forty-five year. That went over pretty well. The biggest problem we had was trying to locate all these guys that were scattered all over the country. Now they did put out – the Army put out a yearbook, SED yearbook. You’ve probably seen that.
Mr. McDaniel: Yes, I have.
Mr. Lindner: That was our only clue on where these guys might be found. We sent off letters to every university that was mentioned in that book with the names of people we were trying to find.
Mr. McDaniel: Because that’s probably all they had in the yearbook was the name and where they were – the University where they were from where they were recruited from, for a lot of them. What year was that yearbook put out?
Mr. Lindner: Well the yearbook came out by the Army right after the war. Unfortunately, a lot of fellows didn’t know about that, didn’t get a picture or any mention in that yearbook. These, again, were the guys who were married. They were not living at the barracks. So they never came by the orderly room to see what was going on. They didn’t know that there was a book going to be put together, unfortunately. But we could find – we found people anyway that weren’t in that book.
Mr. McDaniel: So in ’87, ’88 you had a forty-five year reunion?
Mr. Lindner: Let’s see. That was ’43 and forty-five years – must have been ’90.
Mr. McDaniel: Well ’43 to ’93 would have been fifty. So it was about ’88.
Mr. Lindner: Yeah. The biggest one we had was the fifty-year because by that time we had all kinds of names and we had four hundred and four people show up. Now, that included some wives, of course, but that was a wonderful reunion.
Mr. McDaniel: During the war there were about a thousand SED.
Mr. Lindner: Yeah, about twelve hundred and fifty-seven, supposedly. Now a lot of SEDers came into Oak Ridge but they didn’t stay. They went to Los Alamos, which was sort of a shell off point, I guess, for those people that went down there.
Mr. McDaniel: So you had your 50th Anniversary, your 50th reunion, I suppose.
Mr. Lindner: Then we had a fifty-five that we were starting to lose people by then. The 60th was the last one and we had only about ninety people show up. From there it’s gone down pretty fast.
Mr. McDaniel: So you decided not to have any more reunions.
Mr. Lindner: Well it’s an awful lot of work for one thing, and we were the same bunch that were doing it all the time. [laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: Well you had a mini-reunion here three weeks ago, didn’t you?
Mr. Lindner: Well they had one down there at the Preservation Historical Society.
Mr. McDaniel: Had a presentation about the SED.
Mr. Lindner: Bill Wilcox got together those that we knew were still in the area, but I think there were only six of us that were able to make it.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, what have I not asked you about that you’d like to mention, that you’d like to talk about your time in Oak Ridge or your thoughts about your work in Oak Ridge?
Mr. Lindner: Well, my work in Oak Ridge except for that final couple of months, I guess, I enjoyed every bit of it. I didn’t mind coming in on weekends to take care of projects that had been started or may be in a test mode in one of the plants. No, I just thought I was real fortunate to have the job I had and being able to come and go when it was necessary, when I felt like it, because I always felt like it. I worked with people that were complaining all the time and I couldn’t understand. They had the best job in the dog gone world as far as I’m concerned. No names involved, but could never understand them.
Mr. McDaniel: Well I guess Oak Ridge also traditionally has had a lot of entertainment, a lot of cultural activities, a lot of social interaction opportunities and things such as that.
Mr. Lindner: Oh yeah. We’ve got the Health Program here. We’ve got everything we need for retirement. Some of the shopping is not what we’d like but we don’t go to Knoxville unless it’s a real emergency.
Mr. McDaniel: Exactly. But I guess your kids growing up in the area, they were exposed to some interesting things.
Mr. Lindner: Oh yeah. They all grew up in Norris and they were all married when they were living up in Norris.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right?
Mr. Lindner: They all flit the nest. We’ve got – our son is in Union, South Carolina near Spartanburg. Our oldest daughter is in the Seattle area. Our youngest daughter is the closest one of the kids and she’s down near Smithfield, Tennessee, which is near Sparta.
Mr. McDaniel: Do you all travel a lot to see them or do they travel to see you?
Mr. Lindner: Well, it’s some of both. Our traveling is getting a little shorter these days, but we did have a reunion at Thanksgiving up at Pigeon Forge and the people that were in the immediate area were there. We had nineteen of the family. The ones from Seattle, and then we’ve got a grandson living in Hawaii and that was a little bit much for him to fly in and out. Then we’ve got a grandson and his family down in Orlando. So they’re the only ones that didn’t make it.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, I appreciate your taking the time to talk to me and share a little bit about your life and your time in Oak Ridge. Is there anything else you’d like to say?
Mr. Lindner: Well, I’ve enjoyed this interview, Keith, and we’ve enjoyed living in this part of the country. The only other place we ever thought about when I retired was Seattle because that’s to us as – we thought, “Good grief, we’re going to leave this area with all our friends?” No. So we just stayed here.
Mr. McDaniel: All right. Well thank you very much sir. I appreciate it.
Mr. Lindner: Thank you.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay.
[end of recording]

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ORAL HISTORY OF GORDON LINDNER
Interviewed and filmed by Keith McDaniel
December 30, 2010
Mr. McDaniel: This is Keith McDaniel and today is December the 30th, 2010 and I am at the home of Gordon Lindner. Mr. Lindner, thank you for taking time to talk to us.
Mr. Lindner: Glad to be of service. I’m anxious to hear what you’ve got here.
Mr. McDaniel: All right. Well, let’s just start at the very beginning. Why don’t you tell me where you were born and raised and something about your family?
Mr. Lindner: Okay. Well I was born May 5, 1923 in Great Falls, Montana. My folks, Herb and Nelly Lindner had moved out there about two years before that when he was able to get a job with the Anaconda – ACM copper mining company. I grew up in Great Falls, went through elementary, secondary schools. Graduated from high school, was involved with tennis, baseball, drama. Enjoyed high school particularly.
Mr. McDaniel: So your dad worked for the mining company?
Mr. Lindner: Yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: Copper mining company?
Mr. Lindner: Yeah. He was in the zinc processing end of it.
Mr. McDaniel: What kind of education did your dad have?
Mr. Lindner: He had a mining degree from the University of Wisconsin.
Mr. McDaniel: What did your mother do? Did she work out of the home?
Mr. Lindner: She was typical home – yeah, home woman like women were in those days.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. So did you have any brothers or sisters?
Mr. Lindner: I had one brother, younger, thirteen months. Essentially one year younger, so he was one year behind me all the way through school.
Mr. McDaniel: What was it like growing up in Montana at that time?
Mr. Lindner: Well we evidently enjoyed it particularly in wintertime, which is different from down here, because we ice skated, we skied; we did all the sports that you would normally do in the wintertime up there.
Mr. McDaniel: Were you any good at any of them?
Mr. Lindner: Well I enjoyed them all.
[laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: But you didn’t go to college on a skiing scholarship or anything like that did you?
Mr. Lindner: No, but I did go on a scholarship.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay, so you graduated. You grew up in Montana there and you went to school there.
Mr. Lindner: Right.
Mr. McDaniel: So you stayed there from the time you were born until college, right?
Mr. Lindner: 1941. I graduated from high school in June of ’41 and I had already applied to Montana State College which – at Bozeman, Montana – which is now Montana State University. I got a one year scholarship for tuition and went into the Mechanical Engineering Program.
Mr. McDaniel: How far was that from your home?
Mr. Lindner: That was roughly two hundred miles.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay. So you went to – this was 1941 – the fall of ’41, you entered Montana State College to study engineering.
Mr. Lindner: Right.
Mr. McDaniel: Then the U.S. went into World War II. What do you remember about that?
Mr. Lindner: Well, I was at a boarding house that first year as a freshman and we were sitting around listening to the radio, I remember, that Sunday morning when December 7th occurred. Yeah, it was quite an unbelievable event then as it still is now. I continued in school until March 1943. At that time, recruiters for the U.S. Army Air Corps, which is now the Air Force, came through the University looking for interested students to go into their program and become, oh, weather forecasters. They just weaved a tremendous, interesting program.
Mr. McDaniel: They were good salesmen, weren’t they?
Mr. Lindner: “You wouldn’t be up in the front lines. You’d be behind predicting weather conditions for the airplanes that they’re flying out in that area. After the war, airlines are going to take off. They’re going to be needing your kind of people everywhere in the United States. It’s going to be a wonderful future for you.” I think they cleaned out the whole sophomore class waiting to sign up.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. So basically you were in school for two years?
Mr. Lindner: Yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: So I guess by this point you were what, nineteen or so, nineteen or twenty?
Mr. Lindner: Yeah. Well 1940 – yeah, about twenty I guess.
Mr. McDaniel: So after two years of college, you joined the Army Air Corps?
Mr. Lindner: Yeah, Army Air Corps. I was inducted March 6th of 1943, went to Salt Lake City, where I was actually inducted and sent from there down to Fresno, California, where I went through basic training and waiting to be assigned a college for meteorology, and I waited, and I went through basic training, and I waited, and I went through basic training. Well, about August, I was still there when I was told that there were more candidates for meteorology school than they would ever need and, “We’re going to have to do something else with you.” So they sent me to Stanford, Palo Alto, California where I took a few more tests. First thing I knew, I was in the ASTP, Army Specialized Training Program. And what was that? Well, they’re going to send me back to school that I just got out of. And where did they send me? Would you think they’d send me anywhere near Montana? Well, no: City College of New York.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? Excuse me for just a second. Take that cord that’s hanging by your hands and just put it over to one side of your knee there.
Mr. Lindner: This?
Mr. McDaniel: There we go. Yeah, that’s good. When you were moving your hands, which is fine, I hear a little rubbing there.
Mr. Lindner: Oh, all right.
Mr. McDaniel: It’s fine but now you’re – we’re – whatever you want to do is fine.
Mr. Lindner: Okay.
Mr. McDaniel: So you ended up in City College in New York?
Mr. Lindner: Yeah. That was August of ’43. I stayed at that college for essentially a full year because August of 1944, the program is – well the program is already failing anyway.
Mr. McDaniel: What did they send you there to study?
Mr. Lindner: Oh, the same things that I would be studying if I was back at Montana State College. They had my records, so they knew what courses I still needed. So I had essentially one full year of college which I was able to use when I got back to Montana after the war, which was a break. It was a break being in New York. By gosh, they took care of you there, the U.S.O. We saw more first class movies, live shows. It was wonderful.
Mr. McDaniel: Probably – like you said your interest in drama and theater in high school, I thought that was very – and you probably never had an opportunity to be exposed to that kind of thing before, not on that level.
Mr. Lindner: Not on that level, no. All this was free. Get a ticket at the U.S.O.
Mr. McDaniel: Wow. So you stayed there until ’44.
Mr. Lindner: ’44.
Mr. McDaniel: Then what happened?
Mr. Lindner: Well just before the program was cancelled there at CCNY, we were interviewed again. They wanted to know what our interests were in professional – what we wanted to be when we finally got out of the Army and so forth. Well one of the things I was very interested in and – modesty – did a very good job at was drafting. That’s what I had a course there in CCNY, so I mentioned that. To this day, I think that is the reason that I was picked to come to Oak Ridge and the Manhattan Project and [become] a member of the Special Engineer Detachment, because when I got here, I went to work at Y-12 Engineering. Everybody in those days did their own drafting work. So I was assigned a drafting table right away, T-squares and all that good stuff.
Mr. McDaniel: So you were doing drafting at Y-12 for various departments or –
Mr. Lindner: Well, essentially for the electromagnetic separation process.
Mr. McDaniel: When did you come to Oak Ridge?
Mr. Lindner: That was early August of ’44, probably August 6th, I would guess. It was the first week.
Mr. McDaniel: I talked to several SED members. A lot of folks told me that other people didn’t even know they were in the Army because they were just working in civilian clothes and going to work just like everybody else.
Mr. Lindner: Not this kid. We didn’t have any civilian clothes. We went in uniform every day. I’m surprised there were SEDers that didn’t.
Mr. McDaniel: I know. I’ve had several that say no, they did not.
Mr. Lindner: Well, I’ll be dog gone. No.
Mr. McDaniel: So you went in uniform every day?
Mr. Lindner: Yep. Sure did. Caught a bus right by the barracks there in town.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. Now where did you live?
Mr. Lindner: In the barracks.
Mr. McDaniel: The barracks were like in the middle town section?
Mr. Lindner: Yeah. About where the pizza place – which one is that? Well Long John Silver, in that area.
Mr. McDaniel: Did all the SED live in those barracks?
Mr. Lindner: Well not all of them. The ones that didn’t were those who were married and their wives were with them because there was no housing for married GIs except the officers. So what those fellows did, those couples, they would go up to Cove Lake or Kingston and commute every day, coming in to work and going back in the evening. I was married at the time. We were married at the time because my wife was taking a nursing training course there at Montana State College. She had signed a contract that would keep her there until she graduated with a per diem every month to keep her there. So she was locked in. We got married just before I came down here in 1944.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, so you got married right before you came to Oak Ridge?
Mr. Lindner: Well at that time it looked like all of us there at CCNY and that ASTP program were going to be going into a rifle company somewhere and overseas and we’d been engaged for a year and a half by that time. We were pretty well resolved that was going to be it. So anyway, I was in the barracks.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. You were in the barracks. So tell me what – when you first found out you were coming to Oak Ridge, what did they tell you? What did they tell you about where you were going and what you were going to do?
Mr. Lindner: As I remember the only thing I was told was I was going to Knoxville, Tennessee and that’s where the train took us and we were picked up by an Army car brought out through Solway entrance into the barracks area.
Mr. McDaniel: What did you think when you came into the town?
Mr. Lindner: Well it’s hard to express what you think. You didn’t know where you were really because Oak Ridge didn’t have a name then. Sort of knew where Tennessee was but by gosh, we’re from way out West.
[laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: So you went to – I guess they took you to the barracks and got you set up, established.
Mr. Lindner: Yeah, got into Barracks E, as in ‘every.’
Mr. McDaniel: So did you start to work immediately, like the next day?
Mr. Lindner: Oh yeah. I was taken out, and I guess others too, to get our badge, our picture taken and badge made so that we could easily get in and out of the place.
Mr. McDaniel: When you went to Y-12, were you assigned to a particular building? What building were you in?
Mr. Lindner: Yep. 9739, which is just recently, I understand, been demolished, a wood building. That was the engineering building. I worked for a wonderful, little, old man, Ernie Zurker. You may have heard this name over the years. A Swedish – a Swiss background and a nice accent. But he sort of took me under his wings as my mentor. When there was a problem, a minor problem of a mechanical type needing some design changes, he would always take me along and we’d find out what the problem was and come back and he’d discuss it with me and I’d start drawing up what he had thought was the solution to the problem.
Mr. McDaniel: I’ll bet that was good for you to have somebody to mentor you just right off the bat there like that.
Mr. Lindner: Oh, it was, yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: What did you think or what did you know about what was happening at Y-12 or even in Oak Ridge?
Mr. Lindner: Well, I didn’t know too much about what was going on but I also had some Army buddies in the SED who had been sent to Berkeley, California where E. O. Lawrence was perfecting the procedure for that separation process, and they didn’t come right out and tell me what was going on but they had a textbook which showed what the cyclotron was doing and gave me as close as they felt they could without being hung [laughter]. So I had I guess maybe a basic idea what was going on.
Mr. McDaniel: But once you got to Oak Ridge, the calutrons are operational; they were going, weren’t they?
Mr. Lindner: Yeah, they were. They were having some problems and that’s one of the things I got involved with.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay, so you were in Oak Ridge. You’re married at the time but you were – your wife wasn’t here.
Mr. Lindner: Right.
Mr. McDaniel: So tell me, how long were you in Oak Ridge and when did you go back to school and all that?
Mr. Lindner: Okay. Well, my wife finished her work up there in Montana but she needed to take a follow-up course and she knew where I was by that time. She talked with the people up there in Montana that were regulating the follow-up procedures, and it just so happens that one of the fellows up there happened to have a relative at Norris, Tennessee. Well anyway, she found out that she could get transferred down here very easily and into a follow-up intern project. So she arrived here in the fall of ’45 right after the bomb was dropped. We stayed here until May 7th of ’46. By that time though, right after the war, housing was getting available because so many of the workers were laid off. The thing was over with. So we were very lucky.
Mr. McDaniel: You had your choice didn’t you?
Mr. Lindner: The GIs were given victory cottages. Do you know what a victory cottage is?
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, yeah.
Mr. Lindner: I got some pictures here. But we were in with another SED couple.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s tough going from the frying pan into the fire, wasn’t it?
[laughter]
Mr. Lindner: Hot as could be in those months that we were there in the summer. But anyway, we enjoyed that living. She worked at the hospital while I still worked at Y-12.
Mr. McDaniel: Were you still in the service?
Mr. Lindner: Oh, yeah. That was in May – the early part of May when I was discharged down at Ft. McPherson at Atlanta.
Mr. McDaniel: That was May of ’46?
Mr. Lindner: Yeah. During the months I was there when she came and we were at the victory cottage, I had purchased a 1941 Chevy sedan because when this was over with, we were going to go all the way back to Montana.
Mr. McDaniel: You were going to get the heck out of Dodge, weren’t you?
[laughter]
Mr. Lindner: Yeah. So anyway, I rebuilt the motor with the help of another SEDer, John Farkerson, who died some time ago, but he was a great help. After discharged down there at Ft. McPherson, we drove down along the Gulf. We just took our time. We were going to see everything we could because we were never going to be back in this part of the country. So anyway, we got up to Montana and about the middle of June thought we’d go through Yellowstone Park but it hadn’t opened up yet. It was still snowed under.
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah. So you took, what, three – two or three or four weeks to get back, didn’t you?
Mr. Lindner: Oh yeah. Just an easy, comfortable, take our time, had no worries about such things as tires that we should have been worried to death about.
Mr. McDaniel: Too young and too stupid to really know, weren’t you?
[laughter]
Mr. Lindner: Absolutely.
Mr. McDaniel: I’ve been there. Sure.
Mr. Lindner: So then went back to school at Montana State and at that time Mary Jane was pregnant with our first child, our son. He was born while I was at school down there for the summer course. But he came six weeks too early.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, my.
Mr. Lindner: We had this all planned out. I was going to get through down there.
Mr. McDaniel: Of course.
Mr. Lindner: So anyway, I came back up and then we moved down to what they called the Cottages that were set up down there in the campus areas at Montana State College and we lived down there at 806 Campus Court. I graduated in June of ’47, mainly because I had gotten a telegram from Tennessee Eastman who was charge of Y-12 wondering if I was interested in a job down there. Well in ’47 jobs were as scarce as hen’s teeth, as they say. But I took the telegram which I’ve got with me right now and showed it to the Dean of Engineering. I had all the credits I’d need, but I had one course in thermodynamics that I would not be able to take until later on in the summer or the next fall. He took a look at that and he said, “$316.00 a month?” He says, “I’ve got tenured professors here that aren’t making that kind of money. We’re going to graduate you. Anytime we get a job for somebody they’re gone. They’re graduated.” So I moved down here in June 10th of 1947, back in the same job I had in 9739 Building with the same people and stayed, and Mary Jane came down then about a month later.
Mr. McDaniel: Was Mr. Zurker still there?
Mr. Lindner: He was still there and Joe Culver, Leo Hemphill. I stayed there until the fall of 1949. I was redoing drawings that had needed to be updated for some reason. I never was too sure what that was all about but anyway it was a good job.
Mr. McDaniel: So you came back to work at Y-12 even though most everybody was gone from Y-12 at that point, I mean, a lot of people.
Mr. Lindner: Oh yeah. I was dumbfounded. When I got back here, I found out that Tennessee Eastman no longer had it, that they had been relieved by Union Carbide the first of the month of June. So I thought, “Oh boy, this may not last very long.” [laughter] I was very fortunate it lasted as long as it did. I stayed over at K-25 then until I retired in June of ’85.
Mr. McDaniel: So in ’49 you went to K-25?
Mr. Lindner: Yeah. I had a wonderful program over there. I worked for a young man who was my mentor. He wasn’t anywhere near as old as Ernie but a wonderful young man. He was a genius at engineering and I got involved with problems that were there in the Cascade that needed correction that a mechanical engineer could take care of.
Mr. McDaniel: So you did that until you retired in –
Mr. Lindner: 1985. So I had a total of thirty-eight years between Y-12 and K-25.
Mr. McDaniel: ’85 was the year that they shut pretty much everything down, didn’t they? But you were about ready to retire anyway, weren’t you?
Mr. Lindner: Yeah. I was sixty-two and the barrier plant out there is what I was really involved in and designing equipment changes. It was a very fascinating job.
Mr. McDaniel: Were you involved in the barrier process? I mean as far as design – I know that’s still classified. But were you involved in the barrier itself?
Mr. Lindner: Yeah. The machinery that automatically did all the work on it. I think there’s probably only one little piece of that whole operation that may still be classified; I don’t know. But when they shut the Cascade down out there in the early ’80s, and the barrier plant was then closed up – and that was what I enjoyed doing – I was transferred to the Gas Centrifuge Program, and I don’t want to say anything about that program. [laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: Oh you don’t? How come?
Mr. Lindner: It was absolutely the worst job ever. Nobody seemed to know what they were doing. Anyway, when they were giving out early retirements, RIFs [Reduction In Force], I was over sixty-two and I thought, “Well, it’s just about time to get out of here,” and I did.
[laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: So how long were you at the Gas Centrifuge? When did you go there?
Mr. Lindner: I was there for about a year. They gave me a job over there in something I didn’t know anything about: heat pipes. And why would – they brought me over because they said, “Well, you get along with people, Gordon,” and the guy that was in charge of that didn’t get along with anybody. So I took his job and I knew not an earthly thing about heat pipes, but I learned pretty fast. But that was a miserable job.
Mr. McDaniel: My goodness. Well, that’s an interesting story about that.
Mr. Lindner: My whole career out there, I think, was very enjoyable except for that last several months. I enjoyed going to work.
Mr. McDaniel: Did you work shift work or just regular days?
Mr. Lindner: Just regular days, but it wouldn’t be unusual if we had a particular project going and I might stay out there overnight and just be there for the next morning. I was always in a carpool, five people from Norris, and even over here when we moved to Oak Ridge.
Mr. McDaniel: Let’s go back to ’49 when you went to K-25. Where were you living then?
Mr. Lindner: At that time, we had a very nice apartment, a “K” apartment, “K2” two-bedroom on Waddell Circle and that was very nice. The only thing that bothered us was the Roane-Anderson maintenance program. They could come in any time of the day or night whether you’re home or not and do what they wanted, and be gone when – well that happened one weekend. One of the fellows that I was working with there at Y-12 had a boat out at Watts Bar and he wondered if we wanted to take my wife and I and our one-and-a-half year old son out for a ride on Saturday. My good gosh, yeah. So they came by. We did nothing to clean up the house, particularly the kitchen. Our son was in the high chair against the wall doing a good job of putting his oatmeal up against the wall. So we just dumped the dirty dishes in the sink and took off. We got back that evening. They had been in, painted the kitchen, the most bilious green you ever saw in your life right over the oatmeal, paint dropped all over the dishes in the sink. We said, “We got to do something about this.” Well, TVA had sold the town of Norris in 1948 and the outfit that bought it from up in Philadelphia was then in the act of selling individual houses there in Norris. We’d been up there and looked around. We thought, “Boy, this is a beautiful place.” So we bought a house up there and moved up there on Labor Day of 1949. We were part of the ’49ers. There were a lot of Oak Ridgers that were moving up there.
Mr. McDaniel: How long did you stay in Norris?
Mr. Lindner: Thirty years.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right, thirty years?
Mr. Lindner: Yeah. Well we were up there in September ’49. We moved back here January 4th of 1980. So it was essentially thirty years, and we’ve been here since 1980, which is another thirty years.
Mr. McDaniel: Another thirty years. That’s true. My goodness. So you said when you first came down, you had a young son. Did you have any other children?
Mr. Lindner: Yep. We had a daughter who was born at the Oak Ridge Hospital, and that’s another reason that we moved out of town was to get up to Norris. But then we had our third child, another daughter, up at Norris and she was born at the St. Mary’s in Knoxville, 1952, and there’s eighteen inches of snow on the ground and we were worried every day that she would not – she would get the call and we couldn’t make it. But those are our three children. They’re all married to their first spouses. We have six grandchildren. Five of them are married. We have twelve great-grandchildren.
Mr. McDaniel: Wow.
Mr. Lindner: Well, we’ve got six grandchildren. We’ve got a big family. All of them are doing fine.
Mr. McDaniel: Well good. So you say you carpooled from Norris to K-25 every day.
Mr. Lindner: Yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: So tell me a little bit about working at K-25. What was it like? What were the conditions like? What was the management like?
Mr. Lindner: Well I had a wonderful man that I was working for, Jack Mahoney. I don’t whether the name ever has been – but Jack always gave me jobs that he thought I could handle. Here again, we’re still doing our own drafting. So I got involved with a lot of little problems that had been big problems there in the Cascade particularly with pneumatic instrumentation that failed for one reason or another due to vibration.
Mr. McDaniel: I imagine you worked on projects on all the buildings, K-33 and [K-]31 and [K-]27 and [K-]29.
Mr. Lindner: Yeah. But then when the big Cascade Improvement Program came along in 1968 and they were upgrading all of the equipment in the barrier plant from very ancient equipment, I was put in charge of a prototype development program. Each of the machinery units was put together. They were designed by the engineering group themselves. Parts were all manufactured right there at K-25. Then I had a laboratory area that we put the units together, tested them out before they went back over to replace the old equipment in the barrier plant.
Mr. McDaniel: That was a huge project. I mean that was like a 1.5 billion or a billion dollar project, wasn’t it?
Mr. Lindner: It was a big one. Yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: I guess like any job, there were times where you had a lot of work to do and then there were times where you didn’t have as much to do?
Mr. Lindner: Well that’s true because in the early ’50s before the big program came on, we were getting a little short on things to do. I was in an Instrument Development Department at that time. So what were we doing? We were doing work for – oh my goodness, that man’s name, Dr. Anderson I think it was. Anyway, he was with a biology group and they always had little, nitty, bitty projects that required some engineering to get things going. So that’s what we were doing. I enjoyed the fool out of that.
Mr. McDaniel: I’ll bet. It was something different I guess.
Mr. Lindner: Oh, yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: So you were doing some work for the lab?
Mr. Lindner: Yeah. Well, this project was located out there at S-50, the old S-50 project buildings. So they were right handy to get to find out what they wanted. In fact, some of the equipment that I worked on when it was loaned out to or taken up to NIH in Washington – National Institutes of Health, right there at Bethesda – I went with the equipment to get it set up and get it running right. So I did a lot of traveling, which was great, too. I took my wife along on some of those.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, that’s good. So you were living in Norris for thirty years, and then you moved back here about five years before you retired. Let me ask you a question about the SED. Now didn’t the SED or doesn’t the SED kind of have a group that gets together or you did?
Mr. Lindner: We did.
Mr. McDaniel: You did. When did that start and what kind of activities did you folks do?
Mr. Lindner: Well in 1993, that was fifty years from the time that the SED was first set up. Well no, it was five years before that that we had our first reunion, forty-five year. That went over pretty well. The biggest problem we had was trying to locate all these guys that were scattered all over the country. Now they did put out – the Army put out a yearbook, SED yearbook. You’ve probably seen that.
Mr. McDaniel: Yes, I have.
Mr. Lindner: That was our only clue on where these guys might be found. We sent off letters to every university that was mentioned in that book with the names of people we were trying to find.
Mr. McDaniel: Because that’s probably all they had in the yearbook was the name and where they were – the University where they were from where they were recruited from, for a lot of them. What year was that yearbook put out?
Mr. Lindner: Well the yearbook came out by the Army right after the war. Unfortunately, a lot of fellows didn’t know about that, didn’t get a picture or any mention in that yearbook. These, again, were the guys who were married. They were not living at the barracks. So they never came by the orderly room to see what was going on. They didn’t know that there was a book going to be put together, unfortunately. But we could find – we found people anyway that weren’t in that book.
Mr. McDaniel: So in ’87, ’88 you had a forty-five year reunion?
Mr. Lindner: Let’s see. That was ’43 and forty-five years – must have been ’90.
Mr. McDaniel: Well ’43 to ’93 would have been fifty. So it was about ’88.
Mr. Lindner: Yeah. The biggest one we had was the fifty-year because by that time we had all kinds of names and we had four hundred and four people show up. Now, that included some wives, of course, but that was a wonderful reunion.
Mr. McDaniel: During the war there were about a thousand SED.
Mr. Lindner: Yeah, about twelve hundred and fifty-seven, supposedly. Now a lot of SEDers came into Oak Ridge but they didn’t stay. They went to Los Alamos, which was sort of a shell off point, I guess, for those people that went down there.
Mr. McDaniel: So you had your 50th Anniversary, your 50th reunion, I suppose.
Mr. Lindner: Then we had a fifty-five that we were starting to lose people by then. The 60th was the last one and we had only about ninety people show up. From there it’s gone down pretty fast.
Mr. McDaniel: So you decided not to have any more reunions.
Mr. Lindner: Well it’s an awful lot of work for one thing, and we were the same bunch that were doing it all the time. [laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: Well you had a mini-reunion here three weeks ago, didn’t you?
Mr. Lindner: Well they had one down there at the Preservation Historical Society.
Mr. McDaniel: Had a presentation about the SED.
Mr. Lindner: Bill Wilcox got together those that we knew were still in the area, but I think there were only six of us that were able to make it.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, what have I not asked you about that you’d like to mention, that you’d like to talk about your time in Oak Ridge or your thoughts about your work in Oak Ridge?
Mr. Lindner: Well, my work in Oak Ridge except for that final couple of months, I guess, I enjoyed every bit of it. I didn’t mind coming in on weekends to take care of projects that had been started or may be in a test mode in one of the plants. No, I just thought I was real fortunate to have the job I had and being able to come and go when it was necessary, when I felt like it, because I always felt like it. I worked with people that were complaining all the time and I couldn’t understand. They had the best job in the dog gone world as far as I’m concerned. No names involved, but could never understand them.
Mr. McDaniel: Well I guess Oak Ridge also traditionally has had a lot of entertainment, a lot of cultural activities, a lot of social interaction opportunities and things such as that.
Mr. Lindner: Oh yeah. We’ve got the Health Program here. We’ve got everything we need for retirement. Some of the shopping is not what we’d like but we don’t go to Knoxville unless it’s a real emergency.
Mr. McDaniel: Exactly. But I guess your kids growing up in the area, they were exposed to some interesting things.
Mr. Lindner: Oh yeah. They all grew up in Norris and they were all married when they were living up in Norris.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right?
Mr. Lindner: They all flit the nest. We’ve got – our son is in Union, South Carolina near Spartanburg. Our oldest daughter is in the Seattle area. Our youngest daughter is the closest one of the kids and she’s down near Smithfield, Tennessee, which is near Sparta.
Mr. McDaniel: Do you all travel a lot to see them or do they travel to see you?
Mr. Lindner: Well, it’s some of both. Our traveling is getting a little shorter these days, but we did have a reunion at Thanksgiving up at Pigeon Forge and the people that were in the immediate area were there. We had nineteen of the family. The ones from Seattle, and then we’ve got a grandson living in Hawaii and that was a little bit much for him to fly in and out. Then we’ve got a grandson and his family down in Orlando. So they’re the only ones that didn’t make it.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, I appreciate your taking the time to talk to me and share a little bit about your life and your time in Oak Ridge. Is there anything else you’d like to say?
Mr. Lindner: Well, I’ve enjoyed this interview, Keith, and we’ve enjoyed living in this part of the country. The only other place we ever thought about when I retired was Seattle because that’s to us as – we thought, “Good grief, we’re going to leave this area with all our friends?” No. So we just stayed here.
Mr. McDaniel: All right. Well thank you very much sir. I appreciate it.
Mr. Lindner: Thank you.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay.
[end of recording]